Teacher Education

Giving Student Teachers More Classroom Management Practice

A short video clip focused on using GoReact to teach classroom management techniques

Dr. Tom Fisher shares how he uses GoReact in his Classroom Management course to give student teachers an effective way to practice both proactive and reactive strategies.

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Dr. Tom Fisher:

But what I did realize is that when the fall was coming, and I’m like, “Hey, I really liked doing these rehearsals that my students were doing in my classroom leadership course.” Classroom leadership, sort of just a different name for classroom management and proactive and reactive strategies to set up your classroom and manage it properly. Okay, that’s what the class is all about.

So, my spring enrollment was only 18 students, so when we did rehearsals in class, and we had three hours, we could do it. We had two hours and 45 minutes, everybody got an opportunity. This fall, my enrollment jumped to 32. I already knew that in the summer, before I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to teach face to face, I knew that my enrollment was going to be too great for everybody, Hillary to really have that opportunity to stand up in front of the class and lead. And you’re never going to be able to do it if you don’t practice.

I’m trying to help them find their teacher voice. So, two activities around that, I want to do something with proactive and I need to do something with reactive, because that’s what they’re all worried about. They’re all worried about the reactive strategies, what happens when kids are off task? What happens when kids say things that they shouldn’t say? Or do things that they shouldn’t do? How am I going to react? Young teachers are always petrified of this.

So round one, I start them off easy, proactive strategies. So, they did two videos in round one, they had to set up a classroom procedure. And this could be entering and exiting the classroom, turning in materials using the restroom, whatever. The second video, they had to come up with directions for a very content specific activity, and they had to rehearse this and do it on camera for me.

Round two, which we did a little bit later in the semester, when we started talking about having the conversations about dealing with disruptions in the classroom. Video one, they had to do what’s called a whole class reset, and they had to do that when there was a class disruption about something.

All right, it could have been somebody using vulgar language, telling a joke, there was a sleeping kid that wakes up and everybody notices, it’s something like that. We had all sorts of scenarios that they had to sort of act out or rehearse. And then the second video was a one to one conversation that you might have with a student who has crossed the line. Alright, so they had different scenarios.

So, that’s what I did, I made sure that they were doing this. So that means everybody for me, of those 32 everybody did four total rehearsal videos, because… And I did do breakout rooms and stuff like that teaching online, but there was never going to be that opportunity for them to lead an entire class.